Filling out Certificates: "Life Extinct" and "Death"

RVTS4GP's podcast

Filling out certificates seems to constitute an increasing part of a GP's job. The variety and sheer number of different forms to be familiar with can be difficult for GP registrars starting out in General Practice in Australia. Certificate completion requiring a degree of urgency, can occur unexpectedly in the middle of an already busy day. Certificates can be time-consuming and challenging, especially if you are not exactly sure what your obligations are, and what you can and cannot write!!

In this episode, in response to questions from our GP registrars, we explore the issue of writing "Life Extinct" and "Cause of Death" certificates. We dived into the webinar archive and have combined edited excerpts from two different webinars.

The first half of this episode is taken from a webinar from 2019, presented by one of our very own medical educators, Dr Mike Eaton. This part covers “Life extinct” and “Death certificates” and what you can get paid for! The second half, ( from 11:41 ) contains edited excerpts from a recent 2023 webinar given by two Medico-legal Advisers with MDA National, Dr Libby Harris and Dr Julian Walter. They presented a webinar for our first-year registrars looking at many common medicolegal problems that GP’s face, and this excerpt about Death Certificates has been extracted from that presentation.

To maintain privacy and full participation by registrars in our webinars, all comments made and questions raised by registrars during these webinars, have been fully edited out.

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Have a great day!

Dr Meryl Nicol